Week 10 Writing Prompt: What Motivates You?

Forget about the fast lane. If you really want to fly, harness your power to your passion. Honor your calling. Everybody has one. Trust your heart, and success will come to you. – Oprah Winfrey

Now that we’ve been working on our goals for nine weeks, it’s natural that we’re all starting to lose some steam. As we enter into the second phase of the Experiment, I think it’s time that we do some navel gazing.

Motivation is defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary as:
1 [noncount] a : the act or process of giving someone a reason for doing something; the act or process of motivating someone. Some students need motivation to help them get through school.
b : the condition of being eager to act or work ; the condition of being enthusiastic. Employees who lack motivation seldom get promoted.

What are your reasons for working on your goals? What makes you eager to work on them? I find that this is especially tricky because, often, we aren’t eager to work on them. In fact, we’re often eager to avoid them, even though we know that these goals could bring happiness, better health, more love, and more prosperity to our lives. (These tend to be the primary forces for doing magic–if you add protection and hexes into the mix!) We want results. The process is arduous and often takes far longer than our first-world-country-instant-gratification selves would prefer. When the process takes longer than we would like, we lose motivation. We lose the drive to keep trying. Sometimes, this is because we haven’t set reasonable goals. More often, it is because we haven’t set reasonable mile markers.

Case in point: I had zero motivation to get my ass back to the gym and watch what I ate for the murky purpose of being healthier. But, by using a few calculators from reputable sources, I figured out how much weight I can expect to lose and when I can reasonably expect this to occur. I made these calculations by plugging in my weight, my calorie count, and my activity level. Once I had dates for ten-pound mile markers I became more motivated.

Writing a book has also always been a bit of a nebulous aim for me. This goal made me feel panicky because it was so overwhelmingly large and vague. Once I nailed down the subject matter, set up a process to get there, and devised a low-ish word count, it became less scary.
(For now, at least! We’ll see what happens when we get to actual book writin’ time!) Then, I became more motivated to make real headway into it.

Fear is, indeed, the mind killer. We are, in fact, our own worst enemies. We can sometimes lose motivation due to being afraid of the change that will come with progress on our goals.

We fear that our lives will change for the better if we achieve our goals and it is everything we hoped for. We can be afraid that our lives will change for the worse if achieving our goals isn’t everything we had hoped it would be. In both cases, there’s the unspoken question: Now what do I do?

Well, achieving your goals will incite you to come up with more goals to keep up the momentum: a follow-up book, a plan for promotion, learning Cardio Stripping, whatever. If achieving your goals isn’t everything you hoped it would be, in the words of Dar Williams: “I have lost my dreams…Find a new dream.”

What will keep you motivated to achieve the outcomes you desire? That’s what you need to shoot for!

Deborah Castellano's book Glamour Magic: The Witchcraft Revolution to Get What You Want is available for purchase through Amazon, Llewellyn and Barnes and Noble.
Her frequently updated catalogue of published work is available on Author Central.

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About Deborah

Deborah Castellano's book Glamour Magic: The Witchcraft Revolution to Get What You Want is available for purchase through Amazon, Llewellyn and Barnes and Noble.
Her frequently updated catalogue of published work is available on Author Central.